


Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel (Only Different)

by tielan



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship, F/M, Friendship/Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-03-02 15:40:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2817473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If an intelligent mind can reside in a body like mine, I see no reason that an intelligent mind cannot reside in a body like yours. Others may sum us by our physical characteristics – I the cripple, you the beauty – but we are more."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Bat Time, Same Bat Channel (Only Different)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fisherman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fisherman/gifts).



The facility at Hong Kong is still new enough to feel shiny, even if the heavy steel and older-style riveting gives it a distinctly industrial feel.

Vanessa follows the map she was given to navigate the facility – a simple application that displays on a tablet, but can’t be used to give directions. Probably just as well – because a whole Shatterdome full of people staring at their tablets and trying to navigate around each other is a series of major accidents waiting to happen.

However, somewhere between Jaeger Programming and PONS Neuroscience, she gets lost in the oddly-angled corridors resulting from building spaces large enough that multiple 250-foot tall giant robots can be stored in them, and finds herself trying to work out if she should be turning left or right.

“--at least they didn’t call it ‘Thunderdome’!”

The boy – white and ginger-haired, no more than thirteen – glances up at Vanessa as he sidesteps, not quite bumping into his companion.

The little Asian girl doesn’t notice her, frowning at the boy. “What is ‘Thunderdome’?”

“It’s this thing from a really old movie. Older than Dad. Oi, you lost or something?”

The girl turns, surprised, and her gaze is wide-eyed and alert, and carefully polite. “Are we able to help you?”

Vanessa figures that if she’s going to show her newbieness around here, at least this is just a couple of kids. “I’m looking for...” She checks the name again. “Dr. Hermann Gottlieb. They said he would be up in Breach Physics...”

“Oh, that’s up one more level,” says the boy. “Keep going all the way around until you reach the stairs on other other side, then go up and come back again.”

It probably makes sense to him. It doesn’t to Vanessa.

“The second stairs on the left,” the girl says, her English heavily accented. “Then up one level, turn left, and it is the second set of rooms.”

“I already said that, Mako!”

Mako frowns at the boy. “But she was confused!”

“Thank you.” Vanessa intervenes before it can turn into a major argument. “Both of you,” she adds when the boy bristles – all young ego and self-certain masculinity. “You were helpful.”

The boy’s posture changes, the small, yet subtle shift of a male who wants to impress a woman. “We could show you the way.”

“No, I’m sure I’ll find it now.”

The two continue on their way, and she takes the second stairs to the left, turns left, and finds ‘Breach Physics’ exactly where Mako— Her brain makes the connection a moment later. Mako Mori, the survivor of Onibaba’s attack on Tokyo, adopted by Stacker Pentecost only a few months ago.

Oh, how Vanessa wishes she’d been the PR on that one. It was the perfect story – a hero and a survivor, coming together to make a family; no spin necessary, just add limelight!

_Never mind, there’ll be others._

Vanessa believes in the human spirit, in the capacity of humanity to gather up the pieces and remake, to make new. She has to believe it. And the PPDC represents some of the best of humanity – a common goal, the common good, a collective and collaborative work from all over the globe.

Maybe ‘proud’ isn’t the right word for it, she thinks as she pushes open the door of ‘Breach Mathematics,’ but it’s the best word she has.

“And I ask once again _what_ are you doing here? Invading my space! Disregarging my privacy! Making a nuisance of yourself – and for what, exactly? Solely because you’re latest shipment of entrails hasn’t yet arrived!”

Startled by the diatribe, Vanessa pauses in the open door of the laboratory.

The speaker, thin and harried-looking, is Dr. Hermann Gottlieb, a mathematician who dabbles in astrophysics, and who is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Breach – as much as any human can be an ‘expert’ in a transdimensional portal to what is probably another world. With a slight sense of shock, Vanessa realises he’s rather better looking than his photos made him appear. The camera may love her, but it makes him seem sallow and still, a waxen figure with a displeasing expression, caught in the middle of a lecture.

He is entirely different in person.

She doesn’t recognise his adversary – similar height, but with a stockier build, a sketchy tattoo running up his forearm and under the rolled-up shirtsleeve, hair askew, glasses rimmed and stylish. Geek chic, intellectual sexual, and with a slightly nasal whine to his voice.

“The entrails have _arrived_ , Gottlieb. They’re even now being transported up to Kaiju Science – and, let me tell you, they’re every bit as engrossing—”

“Say rather, every bit as gross!”

“—as I was promised. But I thought I’d come and see your digs, check out where they’d stashed you. Purely courtesy, of course.”

Dr. Gottlieb sniffs. “Courtesy, Geizsler, would be not barging into my workroom – or, since that seems to elude you, at least turning to acknowledge the person who actually has an appointment for my time, if not apologise for wasting hers!”

Vanessa blinks as both men turn towards her and lifts a hand. “Hi. Vanessa Washington. From PPDC Public Relations?”

“Ms. Washington, I sincerely apologise for the state of your welcome—”

“He means me,” Geizsler says, rather smugly.

“—but this idiot’s day is never complete without annoying _someone_...”

“Usually him. Although if you ever decide you need an annoyance...” Geizsler looks hopeful in the way men do when they think they don’t have a chance, but are trying anyway. Rather like the boy who was accompanying Miss Mori – just with an older body and a bit more life experience.

Vanessa’s answer is sweet and flat. “I’m sure I won’t.”

He isn’t daunted, but bids them goodbye, and saunters out. Dr. Gottlieb follows him to the door and closes it quite firmly. “Ms. Washington. Once again, I apologise that you had to witness that. Geizsler takes great pleasure in needling me at all times – previously by phone, email, and Skype, now in person. Why in God’s name the brass saw fit to— But you’re here about the PPDC presentation regarding the Breach, not about my personal personnel issues.”

He gives her a little smile, droll, self-deprecating, and somehow rather charming. One hand waves at a nearby chair. “Please, take a seat. I apologise for my housekeeping; I’m in ‘absent-minded mathematician’ mode.”

“But you do it so well,” Vanessa smiles at the slightly fussy description, and at his neat deprecation of it. “Actually, that’s part of the reason I’ve been assigned to work with you. You’re scheduled for the presentation to the PPDC heads on Breach mechanics at the end of next month and...”

“They require a translation into ‘layperson’, correct?”

“Well, yes.”

Dr. Gottlieb sighs as he drops into his chair, his hands pressing and pushing at his right thigh in what seems to be a habitual easing of the muscle strain there. “I don’t know why they need to know about my research in the first place. So long as at least one person knows...”

“More than anything, that’s the concern. We’ve lost too many people – too much unique and specialised knowledge – to be sanguine about losing more.”

“I’m not going to be able to impart the totality of my research to the PPDC in a single session.”

“And they don’t expect you to. But some knowledge-sharing wouldn’t go astray,” Vanessa points out, “and even if you can’t put in every detail, even the broader brushstrokes give others an idea of your thought processes and where you’re going. This isn’t about any one person, Dr. Gottlieb. It’s about all humanity.”

“Which sounds very nice when used as a slogan, but is impractical when looking at a subject the depth – both literal and metaphorical – of Breach mathematics. No, no, no!” He waved an irritable hand at her. “I know you’re not to blame. But you are certainly convenient to scapegoat. Very well, I’ll resist. You are here to show me how to present in a way that means they’re not snoring by the third sentence, although any idiot who’d do that surely lacks the concentration or will to comprehend my work. At any rate you cannot be worse than Newton Geizsler.”

Vanessa manages to bite back a smile. “I’ll ask for that to be put on my headstone, then? ‘Not worse than Newton Geizsler’?”

Dr. Gottlieb looks at her for a moment, then bites out a short laugh and holds up his hands. “And once again I owe you an apology. I have been exceeding rude. So tell me, Ms. Washington, what you have intended for this session and the others going forward. I am in your hands.”

There’s no mockery in his tone; he’s quite serious.

And Vanessa finds that refreshing.

“Okay,” she says. “Well, did you have any particular ideas on where to start?”

“At the very beginning would seem a very good place to start,” he murmurs with a faint twitch of his mouth. “Very well. We’ll start with the calculations on the Breach itself – size, pressure, energy, and why the ocean itself is not being sucked into whatever dimension the _kaiju_ come from. Tell me if I go too fast.”

Vanessa asks him to slow down more than once. She ask for a clarification several times. And she definitely doesn’t understand all of it – although she thinks she has some of what he’s trying to explain to her: p-string theories, and mathematical impossibilities that pass too fast for her to follow and too detailed for her to fully remember, let alone sort into significance.

They manage to nut out a strategy for Dr. Gottlieb’s presentation that will both inform and direct.

And it’s not until Vanessa’s stomach growls that she realises she’s gone far over her hour and it’s time for lunch. She got caught up in Dr. Gottlieb’s passion for his work, and neither of them noticed the time.

“We’re going to have to stop, I have a meeting at 1:30. And I think my brain’s packed pretty full right now. Anything more in there and something else will fall out.”

“The human brain is capable of far more than that for which it gets credit,” he says, dark eyes droll. “But fuelling the body is generally a good idea. And one which I forget quite frequently myself.”

He gets to his feet when she stands and shrugs when she protests. “My leg needs a stretch in any case. It’s grown stiff, all this sitting down—oh, don’t apologise. I knew perfectly well that it was aching, but I was far too involved to stop. It is a failing of the scientific mind – to fall down the rabbit hole and discover a new land in which one can get quite quite lost.”

Vanessa grins at the statement and its whimsy. “Well, it’s been enjoyable falling down the rabbit hole with you, Dr. Gottlieb.”

“Hermann, please. If we’re going to work together. And I will call you Vanessa, if it’s not an imposition. Was there anything else until next time?”

She hesitates over the question. It’s not really related to their conversation, but it’s something that’s been niggling at her for the last while.

Dr. Gottlieb is watching her, polite and intent, waiting to see if she’s going to tell him or not.

“You never questioned what I knew,” she says at last. “Or that I could keep up with you. You just explained it, and when I didn’t understand, you went back until I did understand.”

“And?”

“Most men don’t give me the benefit of the doubt.” Most women don’t either.

Dr. Gottlieb gives her a look full of irony. “Ms. Washington. If an intelligent mind can reside in a body like mine, I see no reason that an intelligent mind cannot reside in a body like yours. Others may sum us by our physical characteristics – I the cripple, you the beauty – but we are more.”

The casual acknowledgement is new in that it comes without any praise or gallantry or flirting. It is a statement of a fact, and he makes factually.

Vanessa smiles, because it’s hard not to. Mathematician, comic, stoic, and philosopher. And he blinks a moment, then looks hastily away. “Well,” he says in the tone of someone changing the topic to avoid awkwardness, but instead managing to highlight it. “Thank you for making the time – next week, also? Same bat time, same bat channel?”

“Yes. Let me check my schedule...Yes.”

“Excellent. I look forward to it.”

Vanessa finds she’s looking forward to it, too.


End file.
